Personal content ownership and access rights management is about providing users with the means to manage their personal content and share that content as they would any personal tangible content, such as pictures, personal notes, personal communications etc. Thus there is potential for the user to have some degree of control and responsibility over their own digital content.
The emergence and increasing popularity of communication systems such as the Internet, cellular communication systems and wired and wireless computer networks have led to a substantially increased distribution of digital content between users by means of data communication. For example, it is today commonplace for content items such as music and photos to be distributed directly via the Internet.
Furthermore, the generation, sharing and distribution of content by individual consumers has increased explosively and currently a large percentage of the population frequently generate digital content data in the form of for example digital photos, digitally encoded printed material (such as word processing document or PDF documents) or digitally encoded music.
As communication and information exchange increases with the potential to share more content in a digital format, a number of social, cultural and technical challenges have emerged.
For example, more and more applications use some form of metadata to perform some tracking of information and automation of certain types of tasks or to provide further information of content characteristics of the content item. For example, digital photos often comprise metadata indicating when the picture was taken and what parameters were used. A key problem for such systems is that users often are not aware that they are exposing further hidden information.
In terms of commercial content and asset protection, digital rights management (DRM) standards are being developed to enable the sharing and exchange of commercial content while restricting access and distribution appropriately.
However, techniques for protection of personal content are very limited. Encryption techniques exist that can secure content using a public key from a receiver and thus ensuring that only that receiver can decrypt the signal using their private key. However, such systems do not provide any further protection or assist the user in identifying the kind of information they are actually sharing. For example, some applications generate information about a document, associate tags and links to web pages that a user has visited, and in some cases an application may inadvertently make this data available with the content or even without the content.
In many jurisdictions, legislation is also enforced to protect the privacy of users. Such legislation differs between countries and may be difficult to enforce. Furthermore, it is not always possible to ensure that any data held about a user is accurate, used appropriately, protected correctly and is deleted, removed or updated according to the legislation, as well as moral and ethical requirements. Digital Rights Management standards provide means for defining permissions for dealing with commercial content. A system of rights management has been introduced by Microsoft™ and is known as Information Rights Management. This system is aimed at preventing sensitive information from being printed, forwarded, or copied by unauthorized people. Once permission for a document or message has been restricted with this technology, the access and usage restrictions are enforced no matter where the information is, since the permission to access an e-mail message or a document are stored in the file itself. Further information is available on the Internet at http://office.microsoft.com/en-gb/assistance/HA010397891033.aspx
However, this system has a number of disadvantages. Mainly it is inflexible and limited in scope and requires specific access rights to be explicitly defined for the individual content item by a user.
Hence, an improved system for managing access to a content item would be advantageous and in particular a system allowing increased flexibility, improved accuracy, improved suitability for personal content items, reduced user interaction requirements and/or an improved access control would be advantageous.